Peace in the Middle East
Hey all, final chapter on the war. I'll try and get the final peace deal written and published around Christmas - that will begin the final part of the story. Thank you all for coming with me on this journey.
Peace in the Middle East
Extract from ‘The Arab Tragedy: 1944–1956’ by Abdul Nazim
Otto Skorenzy had been involved in many notorious operations during WW2, notably wearing American uniforms to lead commando raids during Operation Ragnarok. He escaped trial for war crimes after the conclusion of the conflict before breaking out of jail and escaping. First, he went to Spain before pressure on Franco from Mussolini to follow up leads on Nazi escapees became to concerning. With that, he made his escape to Argentina, but here too Peron would complicate matters by joining the Roman Alliance, thus forcing a move to Brazil. He had settled down enough that he was uninterested in moving to the UAR and thus made a home in the country. He hoped he would finally find peace there, and for the most part he did … until 1955. On that day, two men posed as hitchhikers looking for directions and asked him for help – when Skorenzy let his guard down, he found himself looking at two gun barrels pointed right at him. Certain he was about to die, Skorenzy found to his astonishment that these two men, who were members of Mossad though they pretended to be Italian, did not want to kill him. Instead, they wanted to recruit him. They wanted him to pursue a suspected SS network operating in the UAR by the name of ODESSA. It was centered in Tikrit, away from the bustling madness in Baghdad and elsewhere but close enough for easy contact. Skorenzy, knowing the alternative was being shot on the spot, reluctantly agreed.
He arrived in the UAR in February 1956, just before the Second Arabian War commenced. This made his job vastly harder, but he was still able to get into the main complex, where he met Fegelein and a series of other Nazi fugitives (“Welcome to our Promised Land!” laughed Fegelein when they first met). Ultimately, the war meant that it was impossible to launch an attack on the complex as resources were needed elsewhere. Skorenzy spent his time relaying to Mossad the going on of the settlement, which rarely amounted to much. However, days before the Yom Kippur Rocket Strikes, Fegelein would tell Skorenzy, “Otto, I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, but very soon, the Jews will remember the taste of death in their mouths.” Without specifics, there was nothing much to be done, and thus the night of September 15th shocked Israel, the world and even Otto Skorenzy. It was soon realized that Fegelein’s prophecy referred to that very offensive. With that, Skorenzy went to work, extracting as much information out of Fegelein as possible. He managed to explain about Otto Ambros’s work in nerve gas, that there were research labs scattered throughout the UAR and that Aflaq conceived the offensive. In the madness following the nuclear retaliation, Skorenzy had difficulty contacting his Mossad superiors but he managed to get through not only the information on what had happened. Indeed, he had also smuggled out of Fegelein’s office a map detailing the chemical weapons labs and missile production centres that were littered through the UAR. For the next week, Western air forces proceeded to batter everything in the UAR that could ever have been made chemical weapons. The UAR, already in shambles following Operation Samson, was powerless to avoid even a single raid. Otto Ambros, trapped with Aflaq in the Baghdad Bunker, sat powerlessly as all his wiles came to catastrophic ruin.
Finally, the time came to end the operation. Even in Tikrit, famine was spreading due to the collapse of civil authority. Skorenzy told his superiors that Fegelein, Brunner and all the other fugitives were planning on fleeing to South Iran (“The Birthplace of the Aryans” as Fegelein put it). The Israelis knew that the time had come – thankfully, they had achieved their objectives in the region, capped off with the successful capture of Lebanon and Damascus. With undivided attention, they initiated Operation Wrath of God, a commando strike led by Ariel Sharon that would fall into Tikrit and capture (though if needs be kill) the nest of Nazi fugitives that had ignited popular imagination for more than a decade. On October 10th, a series of Israeli helicopters took off from deep in what was once Jordan, flying over the silent desert, before at last reaching a small compound, the only one in the town where lights still worked. Skorenzy had fled to a nearby safehouse and watched the chaos from a distance. The town of Tikrit was awoken by the sounds of explosions and machine gunfire. No one had expected the Israelis to arrive in the town in such an auspicious way, or indeed any way at all. Storming the complex, they found the SS fugitives were not ready to give up without a fight. Walter Rauff managed to engage Sharon in hand-to-hand combat before Sharon shook him off and fired ‘enough bullets into him to make him more holes than flesh’. Alois Brunner attempted to throw a grenade but was shot in the hand during the attempted throw, causing him to drop the grenade, which not only blew him up but broke the ceiling and sent half the building on top of him. Klaus Barbie would be among the highest targets to be successfully captured, but Fegelein would escape the fate of the Israelis had planned for him, being found peacefully in his chair with a cyanide capsule dangling from his mouth. With Fegelein’s death, ODESSA effectively died with him. Every document that could be taken was grabbed and flung onto the nearby helicopters. Skorenzy was likewise brought onto the helicopter, entirely unsure if he was about to be betrayed. Instead, he was presented his old Brazilian passport and told he would soon be sent back there. Ultimately, he would travel back to Brazil and resume his old, fugitive life, though he never got official recognition for his actions until the new millennium. He furthermore never received any official pardon, thus living the rest of his life in the shadow of fear about possible retribution. However, he had played his role in history, having not only destroyed the Nazi support groups that the UAR employed but potentially saving the world from global nuclear war.
Israel’s revelations, topped off with photos of Fegelein’s corpse, the documents proving Nazi involvement in the UAR’s chemical weapons program and Klaus Barbie’s handcuffs wrapped around the man himself, had stunned the world. That all the major powers could be distracted from a potential nuclear conflict was an indication of how important this revelation was. To Israel, it obliterated any lingering doubts as to the morality of Operation Samson. To the West and non-aligned states, it destroyed the reputation Aflaq had attempted to develop as an Anti-Colonialist and tied him to the moral culpability of the Nazis (indeed several South American nations would finally declare war on the UAR). But the most important change came upon the Soviet Union. For all its dictatorship and anti-Semitism, the Nazis would forever be regarded as the eternal enemy of the Soviet people. There was no Devil so great as to force the Soviets to ally with Nazis, and the leadership knew it. In the final twist, the Soviets declared war on the UAR soon after Israel’s revelations were made public, completing the total diplomatic collapse of the USSR during the course of the Second Arabian War. The war was so damaging to Soviet interests and esteem that it would inform Soviet decision making for the remainder of the Union’s existence. Khrushchev, bewildered with what had happened in the last month, tried to use it for his own propaganda purposes, arguing it showed his wisdom in never openly siding with the UAR. In reality, what little was left of the USSR’s reputation now lay shattered on the floor. They had been exposed not merely as bestial for their treatment of Jews, not just cowardly in their refusal to come to their ally’s help, not just weak in their inability to rein in their Iranian puppet, but as comically incompetent goons who sang the praises of a man giving shelter to the people who raped their country. As Suslov would bitingly tell Molotov, “We’re too monstrous for the democracies to work with us and too pathetic for the Fascists to be scared of us”.
But the most important thing that came out of the shock of the UAR’s secret being unearthed was that it sharpened the minds of all parties enough to convince the Turks and Iranians and Kurds to stop firing on each other in a series of frantic messages brokered by the British and Soviets. The Kurds and North Iranians marched to the old Syria-Iraq border, occupying everything north of the Tigris. The Turks completed their occupation of all of Syria, leaving Israel and South Iran as the final powers in the region, swallowing all that was left. By Halloween, the Israelis had recaptured all of her territories, and Baghdad was completely surrounded (not that there were many people left in the city). In a sop to the Israelis, given what they had been through in the war, Mossadegh suggested that the Israelis perform the killing blow on the Baghdad Bunker. Thanks to the multitude of prisoners that fell into South Iranian hands since the collapse of the UAR, there was a pretty good idea of where the Bunker was located and finding the best way in. The Israelis gladly accepted, naming the plan Operation Cyrus in honor of the Persian Emperor who freed the Jews from bondage. The plan was to drop into Baghdad (everyone would be given as much protection from the poisoned city as was feasible) and break into the Bunker. From there, they would hopefully find and arrest Aflaq. No radio communication had been sent from the Bunker since early October, and questions were raised about whether Aflaq had escaped or committed suicide. Naturally, there was only one way to find out. With the help of the South Iranian military patrolling the skies and outskirts, several Israeli helicopters landed into the post-nuclear wasteland of central Baghdad on November 5th. As one of the participants in the operation, Meir Kahane would say, “It was like we had landed in Hell to slay the Devil”.
Only twice on the surface was any resistance encountered, one from a man so emaciated that he couldn’t raise his gun much higher than his waist. Not wanting to waste a bullet, the commander of the Operation and fresh off his work in Tikrit, Ariel Sharon merely punched the assailant. He was shocked to see the would-be-shooter had died instantly. All around, the rotting corpses of mutated, half-disintegrated and long-forgotten people lay around, some old, some recent. Baghdad, once the crown jewel of Arabia, city of dreams and fantasy, had been reduced to death. It was not a city with dead people, a city where people went to die - it was death. It was rubble and ruin, famine and pestilence, silence and stillness. Getting to work quickly to avoid the risk of radiation exposure, a series of explosives taken by the team went to work on the rubble that covered the entrance to the tunnel. What had entombed Aflaq for more than a month had been obliterated in a matter of minutes. Eventually, it was time for the team to go down, all scared to die, all blessed that they of all people were the ones to go after Aflaq. The complex was vast but they knew what to expect from the word of refugees fleeing the city. The walls were filled with portraits and posters of the regime’s leaders and aspirations, perhaps the only evidence that there was ever life in the city of Baghdad. Finally, the first few people were found, all dead, but what was astonishing is that the gunshots were mostly in the chest, which would indicate murder rather than a suicide. The bodies were relatively fresh too. Now racing through the Bunker, they found the same thing again – dead soldiers and bureaucrats, but it was clear that some of the bodies had suffered from radiation poisoning, based on their confinement and having defecated all over the room, giving the Bunker a demonic smell. On and on they went until they got to the Presidential office. They burst in and saw the awful sight. Aflaq had escaped man’s justice, but not God’s. He lay on the ground, having gone bald with blotches all over his skin, having defecated so much that a pool of brown surrounded him. He was long dead, radiation poisoning having done its work. As Kahane said, “G-d could have given him no more fitting punishment”. In the corner was Otto Ambros, shot almost twenty times in addition to serious physical bruising, and lying dead. After further searching, a few scattered, delirious survivors were extracted, almost all near-death and precisely all having gone temporarily insane. They, along with Aflaq’s corpse, were extracted and would prove invaluable sources of information after their treatment. What had happened was that Aflaq had begun succumbing to radiation sickness at the start of October. In the time that the condemned group had been trapped beneath the rubble of Baghdad, Aflaq was the one personality who maintained leadership. When died on October 31st from his illness, Aflaq insisted that he die in the Presidential Office to have a more ‘dignified death’. Once he did die, the Bunker went delirious, half due to their leader’s death, half due to their confinement. Ambros was blamed for having caused the destruction that befell the city and was lynched on the spot in Aflaq’s office. In the chaos that followed, collective insanity spread around the Bunker, resulting in factions, shootouts, suicides and mutilations, all while the terrifying effects of the radiation exerted themselves. Sharon estimated that if they had arrived one day later, “There wouldn’t have been a cockroach alive in that place.” Aflaq’s disgusting remains were well-publicized, which sucked out all oxygen from claims that he had a ‘glorious death’. His death was so slow, painful and non-heroic that many Arabs thought it was a divine curse, tying into sectarian claims of Christian uppity-ness.
The announcement of Aflaq’s death was enough to cause most of the remainder of Iraq to surrender, the last surrender of a coherent Arab force being made on November 11th in Ramadi to the Israelis, the same day as the end of World War 1. On the same day, the Moroccan forces likewise accepted their surrender. Algeria’s FLN would never formally surrender but were so shattered that De Gaulle declared Algeria to be ‘pacified’. On the same day, the Israeli army, having marched virtually unopposed since the start of November, reached the Euphrates River, thus fulfilling not only the dream of Zionism but the prophecy in the Bible's book of Genesis that God made to Abraham that his descendants should inherit all the land of Canaan between the Euphrates and the ‘Brook of Egypt’. However, celebrations were far more muted than the First Arabian War – the lack of a central government that agreed to peace made the occasion somewhat arbitrary, and many more had died than the first war as well. By contrast, the mood in Italy was one of immense fervor, with Mussolini proclaiming with typical bombast from Rome that ‘Twice Rome and Carthage have fought, and twice Rome has stood victorious”. Turkey had no such time for indulgence – they had an extremely uneasy peace on their southern border with a hostile power backed by Communists with a significant diaspora within their territory. Everyone knew that there was a serious chance the armistice could break down over this fact. The Soviets, utterly humiliated, were eager to exert the rights of the Kurds against the Fascists to extract something from the fiasco the war had become. The British spoke diplomatically with all sides, but were burning with fury in private with what the Roman Alliance had done. Quick backchannel communications agreed to hold a conference in nominally neutral Budapest to hammer out the final deal, which was quickly named by the American press as the ‘Peace in the Middle East Conference’. All powers that fought against the UAR in the conflict, alongside Russia and America, were invited to come. Notably, the UAR would give no representative, for reasons as much practical as they were political – the UAR was so badly splintered that no one could feasibly speak for the entire group of scattered nations that once composed its body. Due to the extremely volatile situation in Turkey, the meeting began quickly on December 14th, with hopes to finish the talks by the end of the year.
While the peace had yet to be solidified, the armistice at least brought most of the horrendous suffering of the Second Arabian War to an end. The war had killed nearly three million people, overwhelmingly Arab civilians in the Yom Kippur Nuclear Strikes and subsequent mass chemical bombings and starvations. Though there were still isolated rabbles of warlords operating deep in Arabia and Iraq, the UAR as an entity had not simply been defeated – it had been atomized. It was a collapse without any parallel in war. Only in the Twentieth Century could life be so centralized but so vulnerable to decapitation. Surprisingly little resistance followed up the occupations, regardless of whether they were Turks, Kurds or even Israelis. A mood of hopeless nihilism permeated the entire region, a phenomenon known now as ‘Gulf Syndrome’. Millions of Arabs now knew that any dream they had of proud, independent states glorifying their Arab heritage were not just gone, but that they could never exist again. Yet even many Israelis came down with ’Gulf Syndrome’, for which many explanations were offered, from guilt over the scale of the carnage to the loss of a clear enemy through which they could define themselves. But whatever the cause or extent of guilt the Israelis felt, their leadership, increasingly dominated by Begin and Shamir, were doggedly determined that no force could again arise among the Arabs that could threaten the Israelis. For that reason, Begin made the request to the Americans to hand over some of the plans they had for Germany after WW2. The one that most caught the eyes of the Israeli leaders was called ‘The Morgenthau Plan’.
Peace in the Middle East
Extract from ‘The Arab Tragedy: 1944–1956’ by Abdul Nazim
He arrived in the UAR in February 1956, just before the Second Arabian War commenced. This made his job vastly harder, but he was still able to get into the main complex, where he met Fegelein and a series of other Nazi fugitives (“Welcome to our Promised Land!” laughed Fegelein when they first met). Ultimately, the war meant that it was impossible to launch an attack on the complex as resources were needed elsewhere. Skorenzy spent his time relaying to Mossad the going on of the settlement, which rarely amounted to much. However, days before the Yom Kippur Rocket Strikes, Fegelein would tell Skorenzy, “Otto, I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, but very soon, the Jews will remember the taste of death in their mouths.” Without specifics, there was nothing much to be done, and thus the night of September 15th shocked Israel, the world and even Otto Skorenzy. It was soon realized that Fegelein’s prophecy referred to that very offensive. With that, Skorenzy went to work, extracting as much information out of Fegelein as possible. He managed to explain about Otto Ambros’s work in nerve gas, that there were research labs scattered throughout the UAR and that Aflaq conceived the offensive. In the madness following the nuclear retaliation, Skorenzy had difficulty contacting his Mossad superiors but he managed to get through not only the information on what had happened. Indeed, he had also smuggled out of Fegelein’s office a map detailing the chemical weapons labs and missile production centres that were littered through the UAR. For the next week, Western air forces proceeded to batter everything in the UAR that could ever have been made chemical weapons. The UAR, already in shambles following Operation Samson, was powerless to avoid even a single raid. Otto Ambros, trapped with Aflaq in the Baghdad Bunker, sat powerlessly as all his wiles came to catastrophic ruin.
Finally, the time came to end the operation. Even in Tikrit, famine was spreading due to the collapse of civil authority. Skorenzy told his superiors that Fegelein, Brunner and all the other fugitives were planning on fleeing to South Iran (“The Birthplace of the Aryans” as Fegelein put it). The Israelis knew that the time had come – thankfully, they had achieved their objectives in the region, capped off with the successful capture of Lebanon and Damascus. With undivided attention, they initiated Operation Wrath of God, a commando strike led by Ariel Sharon that would fall into Tikrit and capture (though if needs be kill) the nest of Nazi fugitives that had ignited popular imagination for more than a decade. On October 10th, a series of Israeli helicopters took off from deep in what was once Jordan, flying over the silent desert, before at last reaching a small compound, the only one in the town where lights still worked. Skorenzy had fled to a nearby safehouse and watched the chaos from a distance. The town of Tikrit was awoken by the sounds of explosions and machine gunfire. No one had expected the Israelis to arrive in the town in such an auspicious way, or indeed any way at all. Storming the complex, they found the SS fugitives were not ready to give up without a fight. Walter Rauff managed to engage Sharon in hand-to-hand combat before Sharon shook him off and fired ‘enough bullets into him to make him more holes than flesh’. Alois Brunner attempted to throw a grenade but was shot in the hand during the attempted throw, causing him to drop the grenade, which not only blew him up but broke the ceiling and sent half the building on top of him. Klaus Barbie would be among the highest targets to be successfully captured, but Fegelein would escape the fate of the Israelis had planned for him, being found peacefully in his chair with a cyanide capsule dangling from his mouth. With Fegelein’s death, ODESSA effectively died with him. Every document that could be taken was grabbed and flung onto the nearby helicopters. Skorenzy was likewise brought onto the helicopter, entirely unsure if he was about to be betrayed. Instead, he was presented his old Brazilian passport and told he would soon be sent back there. Ultimately, he would travel back to Brazil and resume his old, fugitive life, though he never got official recognition for his actions until the new millennium. He furthermore never received any official pardon, thus living the rest of his life in the shadow of fear about possible retribution. However, he had played his role in history, having not only destroyed the Nazi support groups that the UAR employed but potentially saving the world from global nuclear war.
Extract from ‘The War that Ended a World’, by Francis Gautman
Israel’s revelations, topped off with photos of Fegelein’s corpse, the documents proving Nazi involvement in the UAR’s chemical weapons program and Klaus Barbie’s handcuffs wrapped around the man himself, had stunned the world. That all the major powers could be distracted from a potential nuclear conflict was an indication of how important this revelation was. To Israel, it obliterated any lingering doubts as to the morality of Operation Samson. To the West and non-aligned states, it destroyed the reputation Aflaq had attempted to develop as an Anti-Colonialist and tied him to the moral culpability of the Nazis (indeed several South American nations would finally declare war on the UAR). But the most important change came upon the Soviet Union. For all its dictatorship and anti-Semitism, the Nazis would forever be regarded as the eternal enemy of the Soviet people. There was no Devil so great as to force the Soviets to ally with Nazis, and the leadership knew it. In the final twist, the Soviets declared war on the UAR soon after Israel’s revelations were made public, completing the total diplomatic collapse of the USSR during the course of the Second Arabian War. The war was so damaging to Soviet interests and esteem that it would inform Soviet decision making for the remainder of the Union’s existence. Khrushchev, bewildered with what had happened in the last month, tried to use it for his own propaganda purposes, arguing it showed his wisdom in never openly siding with the UAR. In reality, what little was left of the USSR’s reputation now lay shattered on the floor. They had been exposed not merely as bestial for their treatment of Jews, not just cowardly in their refusal to come to their ally’s help, not just weak in their inability to rein in their Iranian puppet, but as comically incompetent goons who sang the praises of a man giving shelter to the people who raped their country. As Suslov would bitingly tell Molotov, “We’re too monstrous for the democracies to work with us and too pathetic for the Fascists to be scared of us”.
But the most important thing that came out of the shock of the UAR’s secret being unearthed was that it sharpened the minds of all parties enough to convince the Turks and Iranians and Kurds to stop firing on each other in a series of frantic messages brokered by the British and Soviets. The Kurds and North Iranians marched to the old Syria-Iraq border, occupying everything north of the Tigris. The Turks completed their occupation of all of Syria, leaving Israel and South Iran as the final powers in the region, swallowing all that was left. By Halloween, the Israelis had recaptured all of her territories, and Baghdad was completely surrounded (not that there were many people left in the city). In a sop to the Israelis, given what they had been through in the war, Mossadegh suggested that the Israelis perform the killing blow on the Baghdad Bunker. Thanks to the multitude of prisoners that fell into South Iranian hands since the collapse of the UAR, there was a pretty good idea of where the Bunker was located and finding the best way in. The Israelis gladly accepted, naming the plan Operation Cyrus in honor of the Persian Emperor who freed the Jews from bondage. The plan was to drop into Baghdad (everyone would be given as much protection from the poisoned city as was feasible) and break into the Bunker. From there, they would hopefully find and arrest Aflaq. No radio communication had been sent from the Bunker since early October, and questions were raised about whether Aflaq had escaped or committed suicide. Naturally, there was only one way to find out. With the help of the South Iranian military patrolling the skies and outskirts, several Israeli helicopters landed into the post-nuclear wasteland of central Baghdad on November 5th. As one of the participants in the operation, Meir Kahane would say, “It was like we had landed in Hell to slay the Devil”.
Only twice on the surface was any resistance encountered, one from a man so emaciated that he couldn’t raise his gun much higher than his waist. Not wanting to waste a bullet, the commander of the Operation and fresh off his work in Tikrit, Ariel Sharon merely punched the assailant. He was shocked to see the would-be-shooter had died instantly. All around, the rotting corpses of mutated, half-disintegrated and long-forgotten people lay around, some old, some recent. Baghdad, once the crown jewel of Arabia, city of dreams and fantasy, had been reduced to death. It was not a city with dead people, a city where people went to die - it was death. It was rubble and ruin, famine and pestilence, silence and stillness. Getting to work quickly to avoid the risk of radiation exposure, a series of explosives taken by the team went to work on the rubble that covered the entrance to the tunnel. What had entombed Aflaq for more than a month had been obliterated in a matter of minutes. Eventually, it was time for the team to go down, all scared to die, all blessed that they of all people were the ones to go after Aflaq. The complex was vast but they knew what to expect from the word of refugees fleeing the city. The walls were filled with portraits and posters of the regime’s leaders and aspirations, perhaps the only evidence that there was ever life in the city of Baghdad. Finally, the first few people were found, all dead, but what was astonishing is that the gunshots were mostly in the chest, which would indicate murder rather than a suicide. The bodies were relatively fresh too. Now racing through the Bunker, they found the same thing again – dead soldiers and bureaucrats, but it was clear that some of the bodies had suffered from radiation poisoning, based on their confinement and having defecated all over the room, giving the Bunker a demonic smell. On and on they went until they got to the Presidential office. They burst in and saw the awful sight. Aflaq had escaped man’s justice, but not God’s. He lay on the ground, having gone bald with blotches all over his skin, having defecated so much that a pool of brown surrounded him. He was long dead, radiation poisoning having done its work. As Kahane said, “G-d could have given him no more fitting punishment”. In the corner was Otto Ambros, shot almost twenty times in addition to serious physical bruising, and lying dead. After further searching, a few scattered, delirious survivors were extracted, almost all near-death and precisely all having gone temporarily insane. They, along with Aflaq’s corpse, were extracted and would prove invaluable sources of information after their treatment. What had happened was that Aflaq had begun succumbing to radiation sickness at the start of October. In the time that the condemned group had been trapped beneath the rubble of Baghdad, Aflaq was the one personality who maintained leadership. When died on October 31st from his illness, Aflaq insisted that he die in the Presidential Office to have a more ‘dignified death’. Once he did die, the Bunker went delirious, half due to their leader’s death, half due to their confinement. Ambros was blamed for having caused the destruction that befell the city and was lynched on the spot in Aflaq’s office. In the chaos that followed, collective insanity spread around the Bunker, resulting in factions, shootouts, suicides and mutilations, all while the terrifying effects of the radiation exerted themselves. Sharon estimated that if they had arrived one day later, “There wouldn’t have been a cockroach alive in that place.” Aflaq’s disgusting remains were well-publicized, which sucked out all oxygen from claims that he had a ‘glorious death’. His death was so slow, painful and non-heroic that many Arabs thought it was a divine curse, tying into sectarian claims of Christian uppity-ness.
The announcement of Aflaq’s death was enough to cause most of the remainder of Iraq to surrender, the last surrender of a coherent Arab force being made on November 11th in Ramadi to the Israelis, the same day as the end of World War 1. On the same day, the Moroccan forces likewise accepted their surrender. Algeria’s FLN would never formally surrender but were so shattered that De Gaulle declared Algeria to be ‘pacified’. On the same day, the Israeli army, having marched virtually unopposed since the start of November, reached the Euphrates River, thus fulfilling not only the dream of Zionism but the prophecy in the Bible's book of Genesis that God made to Abraham that his descendants should inherit all the land of Canaan between the Euphrates and the ‘Brook of Egypt’. However, celebrations were far more muted than the First Arabian War – the lack of a central government that agreed to peace made the occasion somewhat arbitrary, and many more had died than the first war as well. By contrast, the mood in Italy was one of immense fervor, with Mussolini proclaiming with typical bombast from Rome that ‘Twice Rome and Carthage have fought, and twice Rome has stood victorious”. Turkey had no such time for indulgence – they had an extremely uneasy peace on their southern border with a hostile power backed by Communists with a significant diaspora within their territory. Everyone knew that there was a serious chance the armistice could break down over this fact. The Soviets, utterly humiliated, were eager to exert the rights of the Kurds against the Fascists to extract something from the fiasco the war had become. The British spoke diplomatically with all sides, but were burning with fury in private with what the Roman Alliance had done. Quick backchannel communications agreed to hold a conference in nominally neutral Budapest to hammer out the final deal, which was quickly named by the American press as the ‘Peace in the Middle East Conference’. All powers that fought against the UAR in the conflict, alongside Russia and America, were invited to come. Notably, the UAR would give no representative, for reasons as much practical as they were political – the UAR was so badly splintered that no one could feasibly speak for the entire group of scattered nations that once composed its body. Due to the extremely volatile situation in Turkey, the meeting began quickly on December 14th, with hopes to finish the talks by the end of the year.
While the peace had yet to be solidified, the armistice at least brought most of the horrendous suffering of the Second Arabian War to an end. The war had killed nearly three million people, overwhelmingly Arab civilians in the Yom Kippur Nuclear Strikes and subsequent mass chemical bombings and starvations. Though there were still isolated rabbles of warlords operating deep in Arabia and Iraq, the UAR as an entity had not simply been defeated – it had been atomized. It was a collapse without any parallel in war. Only in the Twentieth Century could life be so centralized but so vulnerable to decapitation. Surprisingly little resistance followed up the occupations, regardless of whether they were Turks, Kurds or even Israelis. A mood of hopeless nihilism permeated the entire region, a phenomenon known now as ‘Gulf Syndrome’. Millions of Arabs now knew that any dream they had of proud, independent states glorifying their Arab heritage were not just gone, but that they could never exist again. Yet even many Israelis came down with ’Gulf Syndrome’, for which many explanations were offered, from guilt over the scale of the carnage to the loss of a clear enemy through which they could define themselves. But whatever the cause or extent of guilt the Israelis felt, their leadership, increasingly dominated by Begin and Shamir, were doggedly determined that no force could again arise among the Arabs that could threaten the Israelis. For that reason, Begin made the request to the Americans to hand over some of the plans they had for Germany after WW2. The one that most caught the eyes of the Israeli leaders was called ‘The Morgenthau Plan’.
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